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The core developers of Mayavi are academics. Therefore they justify time and
resources spent developing Mayavi by the number of citations of the
software. If you publish scientific articles using Mayavi, please cite
the following article (bibtex entry citation.bib):

Bug reports should be submitted to the issue tracker. Please make sure to
provide enough information so that the issue can be reproduced. For
other requests, if this manual, the Mayavi web page, the wiki page,
stack overflow and google are of no help, feel free to ask on the
issue tracker.

If you have questions you could ask on the Mayavi-users mailing list. This is used by
some folks and is not too active. Another mailing list that may be of use is
the ETS Users mailing list. This is a more general
list where a lot of folks experienced with the Enthought Tool Suite are
available.

You can easily run the Mayavi test suite using mayavi2 -t from the
command line. Running tests is useful to find out if Mayavi works well on
your particular system. Indeed, the systems can vary from one to another:
in addition to the variety of existing operating systems, different
versions of the libraries can be installed. The Mayavi developers do
their best to support many different configuration, but you can help them
by running the test suite and reporting any errors.

You can use nose to run the unit tests of both packages by doing the
following from the root of the Mayavi source directory:

If you get an “ERROR” regarding the unavailability of coverage you may
safely ignore it. If for some reason nose is having difficulty running
the tests, the tests may be found inside tvtk/tests and
mayavi/tests. You can run each of the test_*.py files
in these directories manually, or change your current directory to these
directories and run nosetests there.

In addition to these unit tests mayavi also has several integration tests.
These are in the integrationtests/mayavi directory of the source
distribution. You may run the tests there like so:

$ ./run.py

These tests are intrusive and will create several mayavi windows and
also take a while to complete. Some of them may fail on your machine
for various reasons.

To help improve Mayavi, you first need to install the development
version, see Bleeding edge. You can then modify your local
installation of Mayavi to add the functionality you are interested in
(make sure the tests still run after your modifications). Once you
are done, you can generate a github pull request to get your changes
into the next stable release.

Documentation of a project is incredibly important. It also takes a lot
of time to write and improve. You can easily help us with documentation.

You will find the documentation sources in docs/sources/mayavi. The
documentation is written in sphinx. It is
easy to edit the .rst files to modify or extend the text. Once you have
done your modifications, you can build the documentation using by
running:

python setup.py build_docs

in the base directory of your checkout. You will need sphinx installed for
that. The documentation is then built as an HTML documentation that you can
find in the sub directory build/docs/html/mayavi. Once you are comfortable
with the modifications, just generate a github pull request to integrate
your changes into the next stable release.